Holiday Party and Live Taping: The Case for a New American Founding

Aspen Philosophy & Society + Wisdom of Crowds Live Taping

The Case for a New American Founding

Nothing like starting our celebration of the holidays—and America’s upcoming 250th—with a debate about whether America needs a new founding. We’ll record a live conversation with Osita Nwanevu about his case that America’s constitutional order needs to be remade at the most basic level. 

Join us for Americanist cocktails and canapes until late.

Is it time for another American founding?

In The Right of the People (Random House), Osita Nwanevu argues that democratic principles, political dysfunction, and economic inequality all demand a gradual, but fundamental reworking of the American constitutional order and the American economy—a "new founding." Samuel Goldman, Associate Professor at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School has a strongly different view of the viability of American political order. Come for drinks, food, and all out debate expertly moderated by Samuel Kimbriel.

Order your copy of The Right of the People here. Copies will be sold by Kramer's Books on site at Reynold's.

The Right of the People has been named one of the best books of 2025 by Kirkus and received early praise from MSNBC's Chris Hayes among others: “The first thing I’ve read that provides a rigorous vision of how to refound this nation if we manage to survive the current threats to these core values.”

Osita Nwanevu is a contributing editor at The New Republic, a columnist at The Guardian, and the Democratic Institutions fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. He is a former staff writer at The New Republic, The New Yorker, and Slate, and his work has also appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, the Columbia Journalism Review, In These Times, Flaming Hydra, and Gawker.

Samuel Goldman is an associate professor of humanities in the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida and editor of FUSION, an online publication of the American Institute for Economic Research. He has written on religion, national identity, and American institutions in several books and many publications.